What It's Like When Your Spouse Is A War Reporter

Nathan Deuel and his wife Kelly McEvers are adventurous. How else do you describe a pair of people who met as foreign journalists in Cambodia and, years later, chose to freelance in Saudi Arabia? They embarked on a different kind of adventure when Kelly, who now works for NPR, got pregnant shortly after they moved to Riyadh. Planning for the birth of their child in a foreign country is just one of the experiences Nathan explores in his collection of essays Friday Was The Bomb: Five Years In The Middle East.

From there, Nathan and Kelly traveled back to the U.S., then to Istanbul and Baghdad respectively. Kelly’s career took off — she became NPR’s Baghdad bureau chief — and Nathan became a stay-at-home dad. He writes that the long stretches of time they spent apart were hard:

Among other problems, it was difficult to be a man, changing diapers, while Kelly swashbuckled her way across Mesopotamia…For Kelly, the Middle East was the big leagues. For me, it was a place to find a good doctor and maybe some daycare.

The family reunited in Beirut, where Kelly headed up NPR’s new bureau and everything seemed to be going smoothly…until the Syrian uprising.